Category: nodejs

In my Twitter feed, I often come across Pulumi so I decided to try it out. Pulumi is an Infrastructure as Code solution that allows you to use familiar development languages such as JavaScript, Python and Go. The idea is that you define your infrastructure in the language that you prefer, versus some domain specific language. When ready, you merely use pulumi up to deploy your resources (and pulumi update, pulumi destroy, etc…). The screenshot below shows the deployment of an Azure resource group, storage account, file share and a container group on Azure Container Instances. The file share is mapped as a volume to one of the containers in the container group:

Deploying infrastructure with pulumi up

Installation is extremely straightforward. I chose to write the code in JavaScript as I had all the tools already installed on my Windows box. It is also more polished than the Go option (for now). I installed Pulumi per their instructions over at https://pulumi.io/quickstart/install.html.

Next, I used their cloud console to create a new project. Eventually, you will need to run a pulumi new command on your local machine. The cloud console will provide you with the command to use which is handy when you are just getting started. The cloud console provides a great overview of all your activities:

The above code creates the resource group, storage account and file share. It is so straightforward that there is no need to explain it, especially if you know how it works with ARM. The simplicity of just referring to properties of resources you just created is awesome!

Next, we create a container group with two containers:

Creating the container group

If you have ever created a container group with a YAML file or ARM template, the above code will be very familiar. It defines a DNS label for the group and sets the type to Linux (ACI also supports Windows). Then two containers are added. The realtime-go container uses CertMagic to obtain Let’s Encrypt certificates. The certificates should be stored in persistent storage and that is what the Azure File Share is used for. It is mounted on /.local/share/certmagic because that is where the files will be placed in a scratch container.

I did run into a small issue with the container group. The realtime-go container should expose both port 80 and 443 but the port setting is a single numeric value. In YAML or ARM, multiple ports can be specified which makes total sense. Pulumi has another cross-cloud option to deploy containers which might do the trick.

All in all, I am pleasantly surprised with Pulumi. It’s definitely worth a more in-depth investigation!

At ThingTank we really love a tool like Slack because of its simplicity and extensibility. Like so many, we use it to get notifications from all sorts of systems. A lot of websites and tools integrate with Slack such as Azure Logic Apps or CI systems like Shippable. Those types of integrations are very easy to configure.

But what if you want to send commands from Slack? You would typically use a slash command for that. Some common commands are /giphy to insert an animated GIF or /hangouts to start a Google Hangouts session.

In this case, we wanted to create a slash command to tell our CI system (Shippable) to run a build for a project. We found that one of the simplest ways to do that, is to use Slash Webtasks from those clever guys at Auth0. We already use Auth0 for securing our back-end APIs and we really love the way they think about developer productivity. You will first have to install the Webtasks app from https://webtask.io/slack. After that, you will have a new slash command in Slack: /wt.

After installation, you use the /wt command to start creating Slash Webtasks. First, create a new Slash Webtask like so (we’ll call it builder):

Just click Edit it in Webtask Editor to start editing the task. The tasks are programmed in Node.js and lots of packages are available to you. No need for package.json or manual npm install commands. The sample code will look like this:

This is just a Hello World example that says hello to you in Slack. You can invoke it with /wt builder and you will get a response like Hello @geba. The context object provides access to all sorts of goodies like in this case your user name in Slack.

Retrieve the Shippable API key from the secrets you can store in Slash Webtasks.

Retrieve the text after your command /wt builder. So if I use /wt builder realtime, the variable “project” will contain the string “realtime”

Internally, we keep a small dictionary of project names and their corresponding id that we require in the API; we could have done other API requests to retrieve the id but this is simpler and meets our needs

Give some feedback to the user; the CI process in Shippable is configured to report back to Slack in its shippable.yml configuration file

A note about those secrets, these are configured right in the editor:

We’ve only touched on the basics here but there is not much more to it. If you are looking for a simple way to create custom slash commands in Slack, give Slash Webtasks a try. It’s really fun to work with and it’s very elegant. And by the way, Webtasks on its own can do much more. It’s one of those serverless solutions but it has some nifty features such as Express integration etc… Maybe I’ll cover that in another post!